International Glance
An informal survey of more than two dozen UN staff members and foreign delegates showed that the overwhelming majority would prefer that Senator Barack Obama wins the presidency, saying they think that the Democrat would usher in a new agenda of multilateralism after an era marked by Republican disdain for the world body.
William Luers, the executive director of the United Nations Association, said: "It would be hard to find anybody, I think, at the UN who would not believe that Obama would be a considerable improvement over any other alternative. It's been a bad eight years, and there is a lot of bad feeling over it."
The price of property in the West Bank is rocketing beyond the reach of most local businesses and home buyers, pushed up by a weak dollar and Israeli control of large chunks of the territory, a World Bank report said Thursday.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has told the BBC she believes the Middle East is a better place for the policies of President George W Bush.
"They will not be my neighbors if I do what I have to do, which is take them back to their lands," he said. "We don't want them here. Expelling them is the solution." 
The overwhelming approval by Ecuadoreans of a new Constitution that gives leftist President Rafael Correa a tighter grip on the economy puts the country firmly on a socialist track similar to Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. 
